AZTECS CAN GRAB TITLE WITH A VICTORY
Rams unhappy with rules adopted before the season
If San Diego State wins tonight at UNLV, and Colorado State wins its final two games — today against lastplace New Mexico, Friday at fifthplace Nevada — the final, official Mountain West basketball standings recorded for posterity will look like this:
Colorado State 15-3.
SDSU 14-3.
And the Aztecs will be declared champion.
They will, because of two forfeits awarded for a pair of games in early February against New Mexico that were scheduled to be played in Lubbock, Texas, and weren’t. The Lobos had no reported COVID-19 positive cases but claimed they had dipped below the minimum threshold of seven healthy scholarship players, informing SDSU just hours before its flight.
The conference didn’t buy it and last week mentioned in the last paragraph of a news release they had been declared forfeits instead of “no contests” like the other nine missed men’s basketball games this season.
The forfeits don’t appear in the standings on the Mountain West website or on either team’s official NCAA record. They do, however, count for determining the regular-season champion and for seeding in the conference tournament next week.
And the rest of the conference is just now starting to realize that, particularly in Fort Collins, Colo.
“I can go on the record and say I don’t think that’s fair,” Colorado State
coach Niko Medved told media Monday night after the Rams beat Air Force 74-44. “Again, none of that matters if you don’t take care of business, so the No. 1 thing is we have to worry about ourselves and winning. I mean, I know that this year has been a little bit crazy, but if we’re talking about being fair, I don’t believe that that’s fair.
“Yeah, that part is frustrating, there’s no question.”
Tuesday morning, in response to a Twitter post about SDSU conceivably winning the title on the backs of two forfeits, Rams Athletic Director Joe Parker tweeted back:
“The league ADs make decisions week-by-week to address the ever-changing landscape. In a meeting with the conference staff and my peers yesterday, I asked for discussion on how we can resolve this concern.
“Unfortunately, there was no interest in revisiting prior decisions. I’m disappointed and frustrated by the unwillingness to reconsider the avoidable unfair impacts for our basketball teams.”
The athletic directors voted last month that missed games could be classified as “no contest” only for specific COVID-related reasons. In the Feb. 23 release, the Mountain West declared the SDSU-New Mexico games as forfeits “due to the circumstances involved” but has declined to elaborate. New Mexico athletic department officials have declined comment as well.
What complicates the situation is the other part of the Feb. 23 announcement, that eight postponed games would be rescheduled this week despite strong opposition from most coaches. SDSU’s Brian Dutcher was the most vocal, reasoning top teams shouldn’t risk damaging their NCAA Tournament résumés against lesser opponents or exposure to the virus by unnecessarily playing on the road.
One factor was the Mountain West’s new television contract with CBS and Fox Sports, which hadn’t yet reached the minimum number of games required to be broadcast to receive full payment. Arguably the most attractive of the makeups was SDSU at UNLV.
That puts the Aztecs at 19 of a possible 20 conference games. Colorado State had two-game series postponed against New Mexico and Nevada; it’s playing only one game from each this week for a total of 18.
One suggestion, given the scheduling imbalance, was to designate teams tied in the loss column as co-champions no matter how many wins they had. The problem: Then why make SDSU play a 19th game at UNLV, something neither team wanted to do (and expressed to the conference office)? SDSU made it clear it would have been fine playing just 18 games.
Another component: Colorado State requested and was granted a forfeit in football when Utah State opted out of their Dec. 12 game for non-COVID reasons (a team statement said it was “due to ongoing inequality and prejudicial issues between the players, coaches, and the USU administration”). The forfeit never impacted the conference championship because neither team was in contention.
And another: Hawaii went to a football bowl game ahead of SDSU even though the Aztecs had a better conference record and won the head-to-head matchup 3410, on the basis of a tiebreaking formula the athletic directors approved before the season.
The basketball tiebreaker — winning percentage in conference games — was similarly ratified before the season.
“We have an agreed-upon procedure … it kind of is what it is,” SDSU Athletic Director John David Wicker said last month, before the basketball forfeits were granted. “In football, we had an agreed-upon procedure and it ended up costing us a bowl game. It’s one of those things we’d agreed to early in the year and we stuck with it, which, as mad as I was about it, was the right thing to do.”
One more thing to consider: Six days after opting out of its games against SDSU, New Mexico flew to Colorado State for a twogame series. The morning of the first game, it was determined a Lobos assistant coach had been exposed to the virus before the team left Albuquerque. He drove home in a rental car, and both schools agreed to go forward with the game since players and coaches had all tested negative.
But 30 minutes before tipoff, Larimer County public health officials reportedly called off both games because the assistant coach was a “presumptive positive,” sending New Mexico back home. There was time to reschedule only one, Wednesday in Fort Collins, putting the Rams at 18 instead of 19 games.
And, with a win at UNLV, allowing SDSU to hang another banner and order rings.
“I want to win a title,” Dutcher said. “I didn’t have anything to do with any of those decisions, whether they were forfeited or postponed. That happened at a level beyond what I work at. All I’m trying to do is win basketball games and that’s the only thing I can control.
“I’m more concerned with our prep, our performance, than I am with rules and rescheduled games and forfeits or non-forfeits. I’m controlling what I can control, and that’s getting my team ready to play.”